It'd be nice to have (an extension for) precompiled VMware Tools* to improve the experience of those of us who want to have a small sandbox to play in.

* - or I guess any virtualization extras package, but VMware Tools was recently open sourced so it may be easier.

I've searched this forum and on Google for how to install Tools in DSL at all, and have found a bunch of people wondering the same thing, but no solution. IIRC a lot of things the Tools normally expect to find is missing in DSL (gcc/make/headers/etc.). Even if I tracked down and got all the appropriate files, it would balloon the slim install that's so appealing. However, the missing utilities aren't needed to use the tools, just to compile them. If someone with more DSL experience could build the modules and package them up as an extension, it would make using DSL in a virtual machine much nicer.

Ah, that gets a little further - recent DSLs (I was trying the 4.x line) don't like giving any arguments to 'df', which breaks free space detection. By using DSL 3.1 (or circumventing the check in the installer), I could get vmware-install.pl to work. However, vmware-config-tools.pl said there were no preconfigured modules, and I'd have to compile them (back to the original concern that I'd have to install a bunch of other stuff - did you do this, or did Tools install cleanly for you?

Ah, that gets a little further - recent DSLs (I was trying the 4.x line) don't like giving any arguments to 'df', which breaks free space detection. By using DSL 3.1 (or circumventing the check in the installer), I could get vmware-install.pl to work. However, vmware-config-tools.pl said there were no preconfigured modules, and I'd have to compile them (back to the original concern that I'd have to install a bunch of other stuff - did you do this, or did Tools install cleanly for you?

I've tried DSL 3.1, 4.2.5, and 4.3 with VMware Fusion 1.x and 2.0b1.

If df is a problem, are you using the busybox df, or do you have the gnu-utils.dsl installed or loaded?Check with

Code Sample

ls -halF `which df`

Anyway, if you said that the tools/headers are only needed for compiling, start dsl from cd, install all the needed tools/headers, compile with --prefix=/some/directory/or/drive/that/won't/be/erased/on/reboot (Flash, usb, or hd) then use the vm-tools from there, or package them for dsl/uci/unc, without needing the other tools